The Blog of Scott AaronsonIf you take just one piece of information from this blog:Quantum computers would not solve hard search problemsinstantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once.

Archive for the ‘Self-Referential’ Category

I wanted to let people know I’m well-aware that Shtetl-Optimized has been suffering from the following problems lately:

Commenters are presented with the logins (handle, email address, and URL) of random other commenters, rather than with their own default login data. In particular, this means that email addresses are leaking, and that when you comment, you should not (for the time being) enter your real email address if that’s information that you’d wanted to share only with me. Another thing it means is that, when I try to comment, I’m not logged in as “Scott,” so even I have to enter my login data manually every time I comment.

Comments (including my own comments!) take about an hour to show up after I’ve approved them.

New blog posts also take a while to show up.

Since all three of these problems started happening around the same time, I assume they’re related. But I don’t even know where to start in trying to solve them (Googling for “WordPress” plus descriptions of these bugs was unhelpful). Would anyone like to help out? If you earn my trust, I’ll even temporarily give you administrative privileges on this blog so you can poke around yourself.

Thanks so much, and hope to return to your regularly scheduled programming shortly…

I have some big news—well, not for the world, but for me personally. Starting this summer, I’ll be leaving MIT, and starting a new phase of my life, as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. I’ll also be the founding director of UT Austin’s new quantum computing center, whose motto will be “Hook ’emHadamards“, and whose logo will depict a fierce longhorn bull, whose horns are bra and ket signs enclosing an inner product between two quantum states. My brilliant and talented wife, Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson, will also be joining UT Austin, as a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science. Our current PhD students will remain enrolled at MIT, while also spending as much time as they like in Austin.

I’ll deeply miss MIT and Boston. More than anything else, I’ll miss the phenomenal students at MIT, who I’ve had the immense privilege to teach and learn from for nine years. Go Beavers! I’m grateful as well to my many friends and colleagues who made my years at MIT so rewarding: a time of personal growth, in which I developed from a skinny, insecure 26-year-old nerd, blogging and trying to prove oracle separations, into a pot-bellied, tenured, 34-year-old married-father nerd, still blogging and trying to prove the same oracle separations (but no longer as diligently).

To nip an otherwise-inevitable rumor: I wasn’t forced to leave MIT over anything here on Shtetl-Optimized. I feel the need to say this because, within the last year, I’ve spent hundreds of miserable hours scrolling through social media threads wherein stranger after stranger proclaimed me basically the world’s worst scum (tied, perhaps, with the other Scott A.), and even called on MIT to fire me. Given that experience, it was repeatedly jarring for me to reenter reality and discover how irrelevant this all was, either to MIT or to any of the universities that recruited me and Dana. Bizarre as it sounds, CS departments mostly cared about what actual research we were doing and could bring to them! So students and faculty afraid to debate anything controversial online under their real names, however politely, should know that even in 2016, the banner of academic freedom yet waves.

Without further ado, let me list ten things that are awesome about Austin and that helped attract me and Dana there.

One of the strongest CS departments and theory groups in the world. From 1984 until his death in 2002, UT Austin was home to Edsger Dijkstra, who not only discovered Dijkstra’s algorithm but also penned the immortal words that might as well be tattooed on my stomach: computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Today, Austin’s CS department is rapidly expanding, and just within theory, is home to David Zuckerman, Anna Gal, Vijaya Ramachandran, Brent Waters, Eric Price, and Greg Plaxton. With me and Dana there as well, I can say with all due modesty that we intend to compete against any CS theory program anywhere in the world.

Adam Klivans. The closest I’ve had to a mentor in the exceedingly narrow field of theoretical computer science humor.

An outstanding recent track record with CS theory PhD students. Since the turn of the century, UT Austin has produced Sasha Sherstov, Anup Rao, Allison Bishop Lewko, Seth Pettie, Vladimir Trifonov, Raghu Meka, and other stars of the CS theory world. That record lets me without the slightest hesitation tell hotshot undergrads who want to do classical and/or quantum complexity theory to apply to Austin for grad school.

The opportunity to build—or rather, rebuild—a UT presence in quantum computing. While I’m excited to help build a new group—and I feel like it’s the right time in my career to do that—I can’t say that this is the first time UT Austin will have a significant presence in quantum computing. Way back in the late 70s and early 80s, UT was home to most of the (proto) “quantum computing research” that existed on earth. It’s there that John Archibald Wheeler philosophized about “It from Bit,” that Bryce deWitt popularized the Many-Worlds Interpretation and Hugh Everett gave his only public lecture on the subject, that David Deutsch did a four-year postdoc in which he formed the seeds of the idea of quantum computing, and that Wojciech Zurek, William Wootters, and Benjamin Schumacher (who between them, founded decoherence theory, proved the No-Cloning Theorem, and coined the term “qubit”) did their PhDs. I’m honored to tread in their footsteps.

Money. Texas, as it turns out, has a lot of it. Now, the conventional wisdom would be that Texas’ wealth is mostly irrelevant to academic scientists, because it’s controlled by reactionary oilmen for whom curiosity-driven research is not exactly the top priority. That might have been true about the administrations of George W. Bush or Rick Perry. But Texas’ current governor, Greg Abbott, while still a right-wing Republican, also pushed through an aggressive $4-billion measure called the Governor’s University Research Initiative, one of whose central goals is to recruit leading scientists to Texas.

Weather. To a first approximation, Austin is lovely and pleasant during the academic year (even as the planet warms, this should remain true for at least a few more decades)—and while I’d sort of vaguely imagined all of Texas as a giant desert, Austin turns out to be lush and green and full of swimming holes. The summers, of course, are hot enough to fuse hydrogen. But for academics like me and Dana, it turns out that there’s an elegant solution to that, one unavailable for dealing with New England winters. That solution is to leave town, to use June, July, and August for miscellaneous academic travel.

Quality of life. If we’re being honest, I’m not someone likely to spend much time at indie-rock festivals, or whatever quirky cultural stuff it is that’s made Austin the fastest-growing city in the US. But here’s something I do care about: even though highway traffic in Austin is bad and getting worse, that need not affect my life too much. Research indicates that, for roughly the price of our current 2-bedroom condo in Cambridge, we could get a lovely 4-bedroom with a yard that’s in walking distance to the UT campus, as well as to stores, restaurants, good schools, and parks.

Schools. I had a pretty miserable experience growing up. I don’t know if Lily (or any future children Dana and I have) will be anything like I was, but given that she’s in an “at-risk population” for nerdiness, I’d love to live in a place with nerd education options that don’t stink. Austin, happily, has two renowned math/science magnet schools—Kealing Middle School and LASA High School—which admit based on test scores. (By contrast, in most parts in the US, such programs either don’t exist or admit purely by lottery.) Austin also has the only elementary school, anywhere, whose admissions director told me that sure, they’d let a student skip a grade if it made sense academically.

Steven Weinberg. I confess: it probably affected me more than it should that arguably the greatest scientist now walking the earth, a legend of physics who could go wherever the hell he wanted, has chosen to spend the past thirty-plus years at UT Austin. On our last visit there, Dana, my parents, and I had the honor of having dinner with Weinberg. After we’d exchanged stories about Telluride House at Cornell, where Weinberg and I both lived as undergrads (and which apparently changed little between the 1950s and the 1990s), Weinberg sung the praises of Austin for hours. (Admittedly, part of why Weinberg enjoys Austin so much is that there it’s easy to be on a first-name basis with the mayor, tech billionaires, and all the other leaders of the city—an advantage that might be Nobel-laureate-specific!)

Adventure. By background and temperament, I’m probably one of the “least Texan” Americans imaginable: a nerdy east-coast Jewish intellectual who enjoys snow, can’t much tolerate spicy food, is bored by cowboy movies and fears physical confrontation. Indeed, until I actually visited the place, my only real associations with Texas were tumbleweeds blowing across a parched desert hellscape, oilmen with giant belt buckles guffawing about so-called global warming, crazed football hooligans filling city-sized stadiums, shotguns, rattlesnakes, and George W. Bush. But then, the contrast between the over-the-top image and the pleasant reality of Austin had the paradoxical effect of making moving to Texas feel like an adventure—an adventure with an acceptable risk profile. Like, if I’m going to uproot at all, why not to a place that’s strange and different and interesting?

Even given the above, some people will ask about things they’d consider obvious dealbreakers for moving to Texas. In particular, what about the infamous new law that essentially forces UT Austin to let students carry concealed firearms to class? Well, I oppose that law. Indeed, when I haven’t been angering the social-justice left, I’ve been angering the right by (for example) blogging about my strong support for gun control. To me, it seems like a terrible idea for the Texas state legislature, which provides only 14% of the UT system’s budget, to force on UT a gun policy that its faculty and students overwhelmingly hate. And I admired Steven Weinberg’s announcement that he intends to defy the law in his classroom, and fight it out in court if necessary. (Weinberg also gave, as one reason to oppose the law, how much harder it will make it for UT to recruit faculty.)

But at the same time … Dana is Israeli. For her, it’s perfectly normal to go outside and see 18-year-old girls chatting and laughing with huge-ass machine guns slung over their shoulders. Having spent a month of each year in Tel Aviv, seeing passersby with guns has become, if not exactly normal to me, then not something I fear 2% as much as I fear crashing my car. And indeed, if one takes a statistical approach to risk, Austin has a much lower per-capita violent crime rate than Boston does.

And yes, I know, the US and Israel have completely different gun cultures: in Israel, for example, the only people carrying around semiautomatics are trained and monitored conscripts; there’s no concept of a private “right” to such a weapon. And yes, the principle matters. But if one is unwilling to move to any place that has any laws one disagrees with, one should probably look into faculty positions on offshore barges or Jupiter.

Austin itself, of course, is only slightly less liberal than Portland, the blueberry in the tomato soup as Rick Perry so memorably put it. Even so, the maps insist that Austin is in Texas, which means that while there one will probably encounter Texans. (A friend, on hearing that Dana took a quick liking to Austin when she visited, quipped that it was probably because Austin reminded her of Israel: “hot and surrounded by hostile territory.”)

Now, the actual Texans who I’ve met so far have been frighteningly warm and hospitable. But the question stands: what will I do if, while living there, I meet (let’s suppose) some sun-calloused cattle ranchers who consider me an arrogant, effete coastal liberal who patronizes them in blog posts like this one? What if they tell me to scram, head back east, and never mess with Texas again?

Well, I’ve already decided what I’d like to do in this hypothetical situation. I’d like to invite the ranchers over to my place for some barbecued beers and ice-cold steaks, or whatever it is you eat in Texas, and tell them all about quantum query algorithms, and ask them about cattle feed, and try to find common ground, just like I tried to find common ground with the other end of the political spectrum—with the folks who called me a clueless, patriarchal, entitled white male douchebro who silenced their already-marginalized voices by not agreeing with everything they said. For I’ve increasingly come to the conviction that, while you might fail to find common ground with someone, you’ve got to try, you’ve got to steelman their argument and learn whatever you can from it. I once, for example, thought about the Religious Right as purely contemptible, deserving only unthinking snark, and I was completely wrong. Even when I was right on the underlying issues, I was wrong on the epistemology. In Texas, hopefully I’ll have a chance to do better.

In summary:

Wherever you’re at in your career, if you’d like to do quantum information and/or theoretical computer science research on the wild frontier—if QMA, QCMA, and BQP/qpoly strike you as little more than wayward calves to be lassoed in—then please consider joining us at UT Austin. To be concrete: we’ll be looking for distinguished senior faculty to hire under the Governor’s University Research Initiative, we’ll be looking for tenure-track junior faculty in both CS and ECE, we’ll be looking for postdocs, we’ll be looking for grad students, and finally we’ll be looking for undergrads who’d like to join the innovative Turing Scholars honors program.

If you’d just like to come for a week and give a seminar, we’ll have money for that too.

Hook ’em Hadamards!

Totally Unrelated Update (Feb. 29): Michael Mitzenmacher has asked me to announce that nominations are open for the SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize. More information is available here.

1. Emma Goldman, the fiery early-20th-century anarchist, is credited for giving the world the immortal refrain “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” (actually it’s not clear that she ever said it so pithily, but she did express such a thought). Admittedly, no one would mistake me for either a dancer or an anarchist, but I’ve always felt a kinship with Goldman over her terpsichorean line in the sand. The other day, it occurred to me that there’s a parallel sentence that sums up my entire political philosophy—on the one hand, my default instinct to side with the downtrodden and with the progressive left, but on the other, my dissent from any even vaguely anti-STEM, anti-rationality, or anti-nerd undercurrents, and my refusal to join any popular uprising that seems liable (for example) to delay the discovery of a P≠NP proof, by inconveniencing the people working on one.

So, here’s my sentence, which you should feel free to reprint on t-shirts and coffee mugs as desired:

If I can’t do math, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

2. Over at Scientific American‘s website, John Horgan posted an account of a workshop on Integrated Information Theory, which I attended a couple weeks ago at NYU (along with David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch, Max Tegmark, and a dozen or so others). I was the “official skeptic” of the workshop, and gave a talk based on my blog post The Unconscious Expander. I don’t really agree with what Horgan says about physics and information in general, but I do (of course) join him in his skepticism of IIT, and he gives a pretty accurate summary of what people said at the workshop. (Alas, my joke about my lunch not being poisoned completely bombed with the IIT crowd … as I should’ve predicted!) The workshop itself was lots of fun; thanks so much to David, Giulio, and Hedda Hassel Morch for organizing it.

3. As you might have noticed, I’ve created a new category on this blog: “Obviously I’m Not Defending Aaronson.” This category—reserved for posts that caused at least a hundred people to hate me—refers to a peculiar phrase I encountered over and over, in the social media threads denouncing me as a horrible person. The phrase tends to occur in passages like: “look, obviously I’m not defending Aaronson, but it’s worth pointing out that, if you carefully reread everything he wrote, he never actually said that war orphans should be roasted alive and then eaten for fun. That’s just something we all know that a clueless, arrogant nerd like him would think.”

4. Right now I’m at the “ThinkQ” conference at IBM in Yorktown Heights. Here are the PowerPoint slides from my talk yesterday, entitled “The Largest Possible Quantum Speedups.” Regular readers of this blog will find a lot that’s old and a little that’s new.

A few months ago, I signed a contract with MIT Press to publish a new book: an edited anthology of selected posts from this blog, along with all-new updates and commentary. The book’s tentative title (open to better suggestions) is Speaking Truth to Parallelism: Dispatches from the Frontier of Quantum Computing Theory. The new book should be more broadly accessible than Quantum Computing Since Democritus, although still far from your typical pop-science book. My goal is to have STTP out by next fall, to coincide with Shtetl-Optimized‘s tenth anniversary.

If you’ve been a regular reader, then this book is my way of thanking you for … oops, that doesn’t sound right. If it were a gift, I should give it away for free, shouldn’t I? So let me rephrase: buying this reasonably-priced book can be your way of thanking me, if you’ve enjoyed my blog all these years. But it will also (I hope) be a value-added proposition: not only will you be able to put the book on your coffee table to impress an extremely nerdy subset of your friends, you’ll also get “exclusive content” unavailable on the blog.

To be clear, the posts that make it into the book will be ruthlessly selected: nothing that’s pure procrastination, politics, current events, venting, or travelogue, only the choice fillets that could plausibly be claimed to advance the public understanding of science. Even for those, I’ll add additional background material, and take out digs unworthy of a book (making exceptions for anything that really cracks me up on a second reading).

If I had to pick a unifying theme for the book, I’d sigh and then say: it’s about a certain attitude toward the so-called “deepest questions,” like the nature of quantum mechanics or the ultimate limits of computation or the mind/body problem or the objectivity of mathematics or whether our universe is a computer simulation. It’s an attitude that I wish more popular articles managed to get across, and at any rate, that people ought to adopt when reading those articles. The attitude combines an openness to extraordinary claims, with an unceasing demand for clarity about the nature of those claims, and an impatience whenever that demand is met with evasion, obfuscation, or a “let’s not get into technicalities right now.” It’s an attitude that constantly asks questions like:

“OK, so what can you actually do that’s different?”
“Why doesn’t that produce an absurd result when applied to simple cases?”
“Why isn’t that just a fancy way of saying what I could’ve said in simpler language?”
“Why couldn’t you have achieved the same thing without your ‘magic ingredient’?”
“So what’s your alternative account for how that happens?”
“Why isn’t that obvious?”
“What’s really at stake here?”
“What’s the catch?”

It’s an attitude that accepts the possibility that such questions might have satisfying answers—in which case, a change in worldview will be in order. But not before answers are offered, openly debated, and understood by the community of interested people.

Of all the phrases I use on this blog, I felt “Speaking Truth to Parallelism” best captured the attitude in question. I coined the phrase back in 2007, when D-Wave’s claims to be solving Sudoku puzzles with a quantum computer unleashed a tsunami of journalism about QCs—what they are, how they would work, what they could do—that (in my opinion) perfectly illustrated how not to approach a metaphysically-confusing new technology. Having said that, the endless debate around D-Wave won’t by any means be the focus of this book: it will surface, of course, but only when it helps to illustrate some broader point.

In planning this book, the trickiest issue was what to do with comments. Ultimately, I decided that the comments make Shtetl-Optimized what it is—so for each post I include, I’ll include a brief selection of the most interesting comments, together with my responses to them. My policy will be this: by default, I’ll consider any comments on this blog to be fair game for quoting in the book, in whole or in part, and attributed to whatever handle the commenter used. However, if you’d like to “opt out” of having your comments quoted, I now offer you a three-month window in which to do so: just email me, or leave a comment (!) on this thread. You can also request that certain specific comments of yours not be quoted, or that your handle be removed from your comments, or your full name added to them—whatever you want.

Update (9/24): After hearing from several of you, I’ve decided on the following modified policy. In all cases where I have an email address, I will contact the commenters about any of their comments that I’m thinking of using, to request explicit permission to use them. In the hopefully-rare cases where I can’t reach a given commenter, but where their comment raised what seems like a crucial point requiring a response in the book, I might quote from the comment anyway—but in those cases, I’ll be careful not to reproduce very long passages, in a way that might run afoul of the fair use exception.

Updates (11/8): Alas, video of Eliezer’s talk will not be available after all. The nincompoops who we paid to record the talk wrote down November instead of October for the date, didn’t show up, then stalled for a month before finally admitting what had happened. So my written summary will have to suffice (and maybe Eliezer can put his slides up as well).

Update (10/21): Some readers might be interested in my defense of LessWrongism against a surprisingly-common type of ad-hominem attack (i.e., “the LW ideas must be wrong because so many of their advocates are economically-privileged but socially-awkward white male nerds, the same sorts of people who might also be drawn to Ayn Rand or other stuff I dislike”). By all means debate the ideas—I’ve been doing it for years—but please give beyond-kindergarten arguments when you do so!

Update (10/15): Leonard Schulman sent me the news that, according to an article by Victoria Woollaston in the Daily Mail, Google hopes to use its D-Wave quantum computer to “solve global warming,” “develop sophisticated artificial life,” and “find aliens.” (No, I’m not making any of this up: just quoting stuff other people made up.) The article also repeats the debunked canard that the D-Wave machine is “3600 times faster,” and soberly explains that D-Wave’s 512 qubits compare favorably to the mere 32 or 64 bits found in home PCs (exercise for those of you who aren’t already rolling on the floor: think about that until you are). It contains not a shadow of a hint of skepticism anywhere, not one token sentence. I would say that, even in an extremely crowded field, Woollaston’s piece takes the cake as the single most irresponsible article about D-Wave I’ve seen. And I’d feel terrible for my many friends at Google, whose company comes out of this looking like a laughingstock. But that’s assuming that this isn’t some sort of elaborate, Sokal-style prank, designed simply to prove that media outlets will publish anything whatsoever, no matter how forehead-bangingly absurd, as long as it contains the words “D-Wave,” “Google,” “NASA,” and “quantum”—and thereby, to prove the truth of what I’ve been saying on this blog since 2007.

1. I’ve added MathJax support to the comments section! If you want to insert an inline LaTeX equation, surround it with\( \backslash( \backslash) \), while if you want to insert a displayed equation, surround it with \(\text{\$\$ \$\$}\). Thanks very much to Michael Dixon for prodding me to do this and telling me how.

2. I’ve also added upvoting and downvoting to the comments section! OK, in the first significant use of comment voting, the readers have voted overwhelmingly, by 41 – 13, that they want the comment voting to disappear. So disappear it has!

3. Most importantly, I’ve invited Eliezer Yudkowsky to MIT to give a talk! He’s here all week, and will be speaking on “Recursion in Rational Agents: Foundations for Self-Modifying AI” this Thursday at 4PM in 32-123 in the MIT Stata Center. Refreshments at 3:45. See here for the abstract. Anyone in the area who’s interested in AI, rationalism, or other such nerdy things is strongly encouraged to attend; it should be interesting. Just don’t call Eliezer a “Singularitarian”: I’m woefully out of the loop, but I learned yesterday that they’ve dropped that term entirely, and now prefer to be known as machine intelligence researchers talk about the intelligence explosion.

(In addition, Paul Christiano—former MIT undergrad, and my collaborator on quantum money—will be speaking today at 4:30 at the Harvard Science Center, on “Probabilistic metamathematics and the definability of truth.” His talk will be related to Eliezer’s but somewhat more technical. See here for details.)

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley invites applications for Research Fellowships for academic year 2014-15.

Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowships are an opportunity for outstanding junior scientists (up to 6 years from PhD by Fall 2014) to spend one or two semesters at the Institute in connection with one or more of its programs. The programs for 2014-15 are as follows:

Applicants who already hold junior faculty or postdoctoral positions are welcome to apply. In particular, applicants who hold, or expect to hold, postdoctoral appointments at other institutions are encouraged to apply to spend one semester as a Simons-Berkeley Fellow subject to the approval of the postdoctoral institution.

A reader calling him- or herself “A Merry Clown” left a comment on my previous post which was so wise, I decided it had to be promoted to a post of its own.

Scientific discourse is the art of juggling decorum, truth and humor. A high-wire feat, attempted under imposing shadows cast by giants and above the distraction of merry dancing clowns.

The “appropriate” tone for scientific discourse seems to be:
(a) Cordial. Always credit others for their hard work and good intentions (allow or at least pretend that others are basically well-intentioned, except in rare situations where there is proof of egregious misconduct).
(b) Biting, merciless and hard-nosed on the substantive issues. The truth deserves no less.

Perhaps the harsher (b) is, the gentler and more thorough (a) should be. After-all, human beings are what they are.

Certainly, provided one adequately treads through the niceties in (a), there’s no reason to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings in (b). Anyone who makes scientific claims in a professional or public arena should be prepared to put on their big boy pants or their big girl pants and have their claims face the brutal gauntlet of scientific scrutiny. All attempts should be made to avoid even the appearance that any part of (b) contains personal barbs or insults (unless these barbs happen to be to be hilarious.)

Outside of science the rule is: whoever flings the horseshit the hardest wins.

Essentially, what Shtetl-Optimized readers got to see this past week was me falling off the high wire (with tenure the safety net below? ). I failed at a purely human level—though admittedly, while attempting a particularly difficult tightrope walk, and while heavily distracted by the taunts of both giants and clowns. I’ve already apologized to Cathy McGeoch for insulting her, but I reiterate my apology now, and I extend the apology to any colleagues at MIT who might have been offended by anything I said. I’ll strive, in future posts, to live up to a higher standard of cordiality, composure, and self-control.

At the scientific level—i.e., at level (b)—I stand by everything I wrote in the previous post and the comments therein.

Update (10/27):Peter Norvig at Google points me to his Election FAQ, for those who feel they haven’t yet spent enough time reading about the election. I’ve just been perusing it, and it’s an unbelievably good source of information—reaching the same conclusions as I did on just about every particular, yet also calm, reasoned, and professional.

1. That’s my mom at an Obama office in Sarasota, FL. For once, I find myself kvelling to strangers about her.

2. I’m at FOCS’2008 in Philadelphia right now. Yesterday morning I gave a tutorial on The Polynomial Method in Quantum and Classical Computing, and was delighted by how many people showed up — I wouldn’t have woken up for my talk. (And before you ask: yes, the PowerPoint slides for this talk include photographs of both Bill Ayers and Joe the Plumber.)

3. Here’s the FOCS conference program — tons of good stuff, as you can see for yourself. If there’s a talk you want to know more about, say so in the comments section and I’ll try to find someone who attended it.

Note: I was a program committee member, and therefore know much more than usual about the talks—but my objectivity and license as a “journalist” are also severely compromised. If unvarnished opinion is what you seek, ask my friend and roommate Rahul Santhanam, who’s also reporting live from the conference over at Lance’s blog. (As you can see, we CS theorists manage our conflicts of interest roughly as well as the Alaska governor’s office…)

4. I apologize that I haven’t had much to say recently. Against my better judgment, I find myself transfixed by the same topic everyone else is transfixed by, and it’s hard to find anything to say about it that hasn’t been said better by others. If you want to enter my world, don’t read Shtetl-Optimized; read Andrew Sullivan or FiveThirtyEight.com. Following the election is, of course, not all that different from following a football game, except for the added dash of excitement that the future of civilization might hinge on the outcome.

(Years congruent to 0 mod 4 are pretty much the only times when I understand what it’s like to be a sports fan. Speaking of which, I heard there was some sort of “World’s Series” in Philadelphia last night—probably in basketball—and something called the “Phillies” won? I might be wrong, though. Maybe it was the “Flyers” … or is that a volleyball team? Keep in mind, I only lived in this area for the first 15 years of my life.)

5. For a congenital pessimist like me, I confess it’s been difficult to deal with the fact that my team (I mean the Democrats, not the Eagles or whatever they’re called) is winning. I simply don’t know how to react; it’s so far outside my emotional range. Since when has the universe worked this way? When did reason and levelheadedness start reaping earthly rewards, or incompetence start carrying a cost? I’m sure Nov. 4 will bring something to console me, though: maybe Al Franken will lose the Senate race in Minnesota, or the homophobe proposition will pass in California…

6. Writing blog posts in numbered lists is easier; I should do it more often. I don’t have to pretend all the little things I want to say are part of an overarching narrative, rather than standing in the relation “and that reminds me of … which in turn reminds me of…”

7. There’s another psychological question inspired by the election that’s fascinated me lately: how does one become more obamalike in temperament?

I’ve written before about Obama’s penchant for introspection and respect for expertise, which of course are qualities with which I strongly identify. But Obama also has a crucial quality I lack: as the whole world has marveled, nothing rattles him. Placed for two years under the brightest glare on earth, besieged by unexpected events, he simply sticks to a script, Buddha-like in his emotional control (although not in his quest for power in the temporal world). His nerves are of carbon nanotube fiber.

When he briefly slipped behind after the Republican convention, I panicked: I felt sure he’d lose if he didn’t completely change his approach. Sean Carroll recommended chilling out. I now face the indignity of admitting that I was wrong while a physicist was right.

What struck me most, during the debates, was how again and again Obama would pass up the chance to score points—choosing instead to let his opponent impale himself with his own words, and use his time to hammer home his message for the benefit of any voters just emerging from their caves. (As an example, consider his pointed refusal in the third debate to say anything bad about Palin—the subtext being, “isn’t it obvious?”) It’s almost as if he thought his goal was winning the election, not proving the other guy wrong.

I have (to put it mildly) not always exhibited the same prudent restraint, least of all on this blog. So for example, whenever there’s been bait dangling in front of me in the comments section, I’ve tended to bite, often ending up with a hook through my cheek.

But no more. As the first exercise in my newfound quest for the Zen-like equanimity and balance of our soon-to-be-president, I now present to you two excerpts from the comments on my previous post, with no reaction whatsoever from me.

Have you considered the possibility that, in the same way a logical deduction is being equated with truth, understanding a thing is just an illusion? If a thing is logical, that only means that it appeals to the reasoning facility of the brain, not that it’s the truth.

Mathematics is just a place where it becomes clear how a human may think. Computers only go for the calculable. And the mathematical truths a computer can produce are at most countable infinite. But there are uncountable infinite truths.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience, and your numerous complaints about the Technology Review site! Currently, the folks at TR say they can do all the minor things people asked for, like adding permalinks to the titles and letting people include their URL’s with their comments. On the other hand, they can’t make it so you can post comments without logging in, and they can’t decrease the size of the ad bar. (I suggested that they at least turn my sidebar into drop-down menus, thereby increasing the screen width available for the entries; they said they’d look into that.) Also, they can’t provide the full text in RSS (since God forbid, that might let people read the blog without seeing ads), although they can give the first 150 words or so.

As you can imagine, TR’s response has put me in a difficult position. From their perspective, they’ve been bending over backwards to accommodate me; from my perspective (and I gather from most readers’), their offer still falls short of acceptable. When I originally agreed to let them host me, I imagined that the blog would look just as it does now, with maybe a few unobtrusive ads here or there. I didn’t even think to ask about the RSS feed or the screen width available for entries.

And so, after weeks of introspection (well, mostly being tied up with other work), I’ve reached a decision: I will continue to host my blog right here, on Bluehost, until TR comes up with something that both parties can live with. I like the TR people and appreciate their interest, but I’m not in any particular hurry to move, especially if it means crippling this blog so that no will read it. It’s true that Bluehost sucks, and that I no longer have time to be a webmaster — but once I get grant money, maybe I can pay someone to take care of these things for me.

Finally, since all this self-referentiality gets tiresome, here are the PowerPoint slides for a talk I gave at MIT last week, about recent joint work with Avi Wigderson on a new barrier to proving P≠NP. (Note: The day before the talk, PowerPoint trashed my file, and I had to recreate the entire presentation from memory. Always make backup copies! Excellent advice, in my opinion.)

Abstract:

Algebrization: A New Barrier in Complexity Theory

Any proof of P≠NP will have to overcome two barriers: relativization and natural proofs. Yet over the last decade, we have seen circuit lower bounds (for example, that PP does not have linear-size circuits) that overcome both barriers simultaneously. So the question arises of whether there is a third barrier to progress on the central questions in complexity theory.

In this talk we present such a barrier, which we call “algebraic relativization” or “algebrization.” The idea is that, when we relativize some complexity class inclusion, we should give the simulating machine access not only to an oracle A, but also to the low-degree extension of A over a finite field or ring.

We systematically go through basic results and open problems in complexity theory to delineate the power of the new algebrization barrier. We first show that all known non-relativizing results — both inclusions such as IP=PSPACE and MIP=NEXP, and separations such as MAEXP⊄P/poly — do indeed algebrize. We next show that most open problems — including P versus NP, P versus BPP, and NEXP versus P/poly — will require non-algebrizing techniques, of which we currently have not a single example. In some cases algebrization seems to explain exactly why progress stopped where it did: for example, why we have superlinear circuit lower bounds for PromiseMA but not for NP.

We also exhibit a surprising connection between algebrization and communication complexity. Using this connection, we give an MA-protocol for the Inner Product function with O(√n log(n)) communication (essentially matching a lower bound of Klauck), and describe a pure communication complexity conjecture whose truth would imply P≠NP.

Alright, it’s time to tell you: in a couple of days, Shtetl-Optimized will cease its two-year independent existence, and become a part of MIT Technology Review. Please check out the new shtetl at technologyreview.com and let me know in the comments section, here or there, if anything is amiss. (Note: You have to register at technologyreview.com before you can post a comment there, but that should be pretty quick and painless.) If everything’s OK, then we’ll start redirecting the scottaaronson.com URL’s to point to the new location.

Naturally, selling out to an MIT subsidiary is not a step I took lightly. The following considerations are what finally induced me to say “yes”:

I’d already sold my soul to MIT, so why not my blog too?

As explained earlier, Bluehost (my current hosting provider) sucks: the sites they host routinely stop working, and when they do it’s always your fault and never theirs. Indeed, every webhosting company I’ve dealt with strikes me as basically a scam operation that does a tiny bit of hosting on the side. So when TR told me that they would be that at which the buck stops — and that if anything went wrong I could walk the two blocks to their East Cambridge office and yell at them in person — their pitch fell on receptive ears.

From now on, TR’s expert staff will manage all technical aspects of the blog for me, leaving me free to concentrate on deeper, biting-vagina-related matters. This will be particularly welcome as the demands on my time shift from the “severe” to “ludicrous” range.

“The Benjamins.” As explainedearlier, as a matter of principle I accept bribes and kickbacks from absolutely anyone, trusting that the money from competing groups will cancel each other out, thereby leaving my overall judgment unbiased. Plus I can actually use the dough, now that I have a mortgage to pay.

I’ll now be under contractual obligation to blog “at least twice a week on average.” I actually welcome this change, since it’s the only remedy I can think of for the blog-procrastination (i.e., work) that’s often afflicted me in the past.

If this experiment doesn’t work, I’m allowed to back out on two weeks’ notice, retaining all the “rights” to my blog. Of course, I hope and expect that it’ll work.

Most importantly, Jason Pontin, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review, has personally assured me that I will have complete intellectual freedom to blog about anything I want, exactly as I did when the blog was independent. You can rest assured that Jason will come to regret his guarantee in the days and weeks ahead. (TR does have a policy of fact-checking blog entries, but as I explained to them, the very concept of “fact-checking” is not particularly relevant to Shtetl-Optimized.)

Indeed, the only real disadvantage I could see to hosting the blog on TR was the amount of screen space taken up by ads. Sorry about that! Fortunately, the ads look pretty ignorable to me.

I apologize for my website being down all morning. Back in the heyday of Bell Labs, they used to engineer telecommunications systems for “five-nines availability” (that is, 99.999% uptime). In our vastly more sophisticated Internet age, I’d gladly settle for two and a half nines.

So, can anyone recommend a webhosting service that doesn’t suck? If such a service exists, I’ll dump Bluehost and encourage others to do the same.